LinkedIn buys SlideShare

LinkedIn will spend US$118.75m to upload SlideShare into its portfolio of offerings.

CEO Jeff Weiner says, in a press release, that the reason for the buy is that “Presentations are one of the main ways in which professionals capture and share their experiences and knowledge, which in turn helps shape their professional identity.”

Declaring himself “very excited to welcome the SlideShare team to LinkedIn,” Weiner expanded on the importance of presentations, saying they “ … also enable professionals to discover new connections and gain the insights they need to become more productive and successful in their careers, aligning perfectly with LinkedIn’s mission and helping us deliver even more value for our members.”

Sadly our PR-to-English translator isn't working this morning, leaving us to guess that the above could mean “this is our cloud storage play” or “our members were spending a fair bit of time using Google Docs and Office 365 and we wanted that time-on-site”. We're pretty sure it doesn't mean “Pastebin is eating our lunch" and that "suits want all their stuff in one place and we'll help them to do that" could be closer to the mark.